Status update: With all the froth and fluff of fiction to read, I'm running just a little bit late on today's new Christian book review...I want to get it up today and not just pop another old book review out of the can! New Christian book post forthcoming.
Christian Thought
This was somewhat personal and I don't have the person's permission to link to it, but I found a lovely one at a cancer survivor's blog that is read mostly by retirees.
Person posted something about recording different football games in order to watch all of them in sequence. While in the hospital, person said person thought person might never be able to watch another game, but "Thank You Jesus, here I am."
The blogger had been back in the hospital this summer, so person had thought the blog might have ceased to exist this fall, too--but "Thank You Jesus, here it is."
Reminding me...I think an unusually long glyphosate reaction, last week, with lots of lethargy even after the purging phase of the cycle, has left me vulnerable to the latest COVID mutation. I didn't think I stood close to anyone in the grocery store, and know I wasn't close to anyone at the post office, which were the only places I went last week I sat right in the front seat of a friend's car; it's possible that the friend was an immune carrier from whom I got the virus and it's possible that, if not, I may have spread it to the friend. But I keep feeling lazy, keep sneezing and sniffling, keep feeling my blood pressure rise for absolutely no reason (like when I'm sleeping), and had that peculiar kind of cough this morning. On a day when all self-respecting frugal folk are out enjoying the bracing breeze, getting used to a sunny and humid day suddenly producing Fahrenheit temperatures that start with 5 rather than 7 or 8, I'm shivering like a Chihuahua. Something is definitely wrong and it feels like another version of stupid COVID. I just spent a week being rendered useless by poison; I'm in no mood to spend a week in quarantine with a bleepin' chest cold.
Being a Celiactivist is very drainingi.
Knowing for sure that there are people who want me dead, and feeling less positive about people who want me alive, is also draining.
But all through my twenties I was quite sure I'd never make it to age forty, and now--while in cyberspace entity mode, aging by decades--I'm looking at sixty. And by and large, even on days when I've slept through weather that just begged to be enjoyed outdoors, it's been fun.
Thank You Jesus, here we are.
Y'might as well laugh as cry.
Funny
For me the funniest thing about this is that Google actually does random Internet disruptions--maybe only if you work with more than fifty tabs open at one time. It randomly pops into a different tab and demands that I read this, already, I've only had the tab open for three months...And I realize that I had it open because I expected wit and wisdom from one of my bookseller heroes, and here is some.
Glyphosate Awareness
This new poison the EPA are being urged to approve is an insecticide. Its manufacturers want it approved for spraying on potato fields to kill potato bugs. How much of a problem are potato bugs? Not much--you might say they're small potatoes--in places where previous attempts to "control" them by spraying have not boosted their populations up out of their place in the food chain. You plant potatoes, you walk through the field every day or two when it's not raining, you check leaves for damage and, if leaves are being nibbled, you pick the potato bugs into a covered jar. When the jar fills up you add water to the rim, screw the lid on tightly, and wait half an hour. It's more humane than damaging their RNA in such a way that they can't digest protein, it's cheaper, it's safer, and it keeps potato bugs a rather rare species. (In South America, where potatoes are native, potato bugs were well predated; in North America and the rest of the world, to most of which potatoes have been introduced, humans need to do some of the predation.)
On the small farms among which I grew up, nobody ever needed to spray potatoes at all. Tobacco was sprayed by those who raised it. Beans were sometimes dusted with a chemical powder. Spraying corn in useless attempts to control earworms was what my father persuaded the neighbors to stop doing; it took years to get earworm populations back down to where nature intended them to be, years when you had to cut corncobs around the damaged areas or have no corn at all.. Peanuts did seem to need to be dusted with fungicides, as truly organically grown peanuts tend to be mold-rotten before they're fully ripe. Tomato plants were also dusted with fungicides. Wheat is so vulnerable in Virginia, primarily to mold but also to insects and infestations of wheat fields with grasses that look like wheat, that people jut don't try to raise wheat. Potatoes are subject to their own kind of fungal blight, but in places where that disease is not an epidemic they need little help from humans to reproduce their species and feed us.
But a vicious spray cycle could change all that. Could change the beetles' genes, with which this spray is supposed to tamper, to stop depending on potato vines for their primary protein and start munching on something else...maybe humans. Could affect plants themselves, as glyphosate does, making potatoes and who knows what else toxic to humans. Could directly affect humans, making us unable to digest a primary source of our protein, and that'd serve us right. We need to stop letting the EPA authorize everyone who comes up with a new pesticide to find out how it harms humans the hard way.
What can these poor farmers do? There is a Biblical solution. If you have multiple acres of farmland, Moses told people, don't plant the same thing in the same acre next year. Where you planted potatoes last year, you must plant corn or beans or onions or anything but potatoes this year. This year's potatoes must go where last year's beans were. This breaks up the life cycle of nuisance insects, forces them to wander about, makes them more vulnerable to predators and thus helps to keep them from becoming serious pests. It also reduces nutrient depletion and the need for commercial fertilizer. When I say this and someone stares at me and mutters "But they are serious pests, everywhere, a plague of locusts!" that person is talking about land that's been damaged by a vicious spray cycle, and has my condolences. The only way that situation gets better is for farmers to write off a few years as loss.
About glyphosate, specifically...This study does much to explain why it so often happens that a friend says "The younger generation are all idiots!" and I say "Actually I think The Nephews are pretty amazing," and if they know any of The Nephews they say "Well, yes, but that one's exceptional in any case." Seems either glyphosate or 2,4-D residues in resistant GMO plant-based food may make people less intelligent, but 2,4-D makes people less intelligent in more ways than glyphosate.
Glyphosate was strongly correlated with only one measurement of brain impairment. That doesn't mean it's not correlated with all kinds; it means that glyphosate reactions vary and can include almost anything. I, for instance, find that I do about as well with word puzzles and about as badly with math during glyphosate reactions as I do the rest of the time, but I do everything much more slowly, due to the poison's effects on my kidneys, metabolism, and narcolepsy.
Music
If you're going to be in New York on 22 October, those who like classical music may want to hear the group booked to perform at the Lincoln Center. Sample sound clips here:
The Writing Life
It wasn't all reading fiction, sleeping, or dashing to the bathroom, last week. Somewhere in among those things the record shows that I sold a couple of short pieces last week too.
Zazzle
October is "Pet Wellness Month." (What fun for a holiday marketing concept.) Printable gift items do not measurably contribute to pet wellness, but they can go some way toward making it easier to share a house with a pet you find it necessary to bring indoors (for its wellness). So Zazzle has rolled out the Pet Place Mat. Putting this under the animal's food and water dishes may reduce wear on the linoleum. So of course I had to put a butterfly on it--in this case the Red-Spotted Purple, a pretty little composter that mimics the Pipevine Swallowtail in warm climates and resembles its biological relative the Red Admiral, enough to be known as the White Admiral, in colder climates. Red-Spotted Purple butterflies actually love human food, but I'm not sure humans would want to think of them in the context of food. Dogs and cats seem to see motion first, don't necessarily recognize flat images of real objects, and don't care what you put on their place mats as long as you put food on top of it. So, although there's no law against transferring this design to the place mats for the humans' table if you want to, and I'd be delighted if you did, it's being marketed as a heavy-duty place mat.
Since I seem to be the first to have designed a butterfly-theme pet place mat, here's an animal-theme design, shown on a mouse pad, that would make a good pet place mat design.
I'm sorry you are having health issues, Priscilla. I just went through a couple of weeks indoors with pneumonia and, like you, have no idea how this hermit managed to catch anything. LOL. Lots of good reading time, though, to look on the bright side! Hope you are soon well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your good wishes. They may even be helping--at this stage it's mostly impatience with quarantine, except when I think about war. I'm glad you've had some good reading time.
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